As every year, I tried to make an effort to write more in November than I do in other months. This year was pretty weak, as I ended up spending more time with my wife than expected during the best times to write. I write better in the late evening or early morning (like 5 am). I think I'm just more creative then.

During the days, the ideas are flowing around and mingling, but in the twilight zone is when the stories and scenes really take shape for me, so I never got to write them down. Since a lot of my writing was during non-ideal times, I ended up trashing thousands of words and rewriting them.

Once again, my niece (she's 12) beat me in word count so she won her $100 to buy presents for everyone.

What did I learn this year? Don't re-write. Just keep going ahead. If you want to redo a scene don't trash the old one and just make a new file for the new one. This way you don't lose the words, you just have more words. In the past I'd only redo a scene and save the old one if I had chosen to tell it from a different point of view, but now I even save those that are from the same POV but altered. Had I done this earlier in the month I'd probably have an extra 35,000 words.

My work was split across two projects. One of them inched closer to its conclusion, and I figure I'll finish it up this month. It's a few months behind schedule, but I fell into the revision trap and am going to just pound through and finish it before going back to fix the logistical issues and flawed character development.

The other, which I had originally imagined as a novella, really grew in the telling. The world for that one (near future dystopian) ended up being so interesting to me that I no longer wanted to trim it to one story. There was too much going on and it wouldn't be cohesive enough. Instead of one novella it will work much better as a bunch of short stories set in the same universe with a few characters. I suppose I could turn it into an epic, but that works better in fantasies than in science fiction.

The neat thing about this story, to me, is that it's both dystopian and hopeful. I don't see a ton of that these days.

Anyhow, next year I will try to get more words than this year (as always), and I'll probably end up writing more in December this year than I did in November. I hope everyone is having fun with their projects, and merry winter solstice!